Imagine heading back to high school, only to find your classmates sharing “humorous” images of themselves in blackface or Klan attire. Imagine seeing your own face edited onto a gorilla’s body and circulated on social media, or homophobic slurs displayed proudly on your laughing classmates’ clothing.
Would you feel safe and ready to learn? How would you feel if your degradation was dismissed as “just a joke”?
These are not hypothetical scenarios. Incidents like these have surfaced in Central Valley classrooms in recent years. Often dismissed as “just jokes” or “kids being kids,” this brand of hateful humor causes real harm. It destroys morale and makes students feel unsafe in one of the few places American society has dedicated for their protected moral and intellectual growth.
Racist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ ridicule has existed in Valley schools for decades. Sometimes these incidents rise to the level of scandal, as was the case in February 2026, when students in Visalia used shirts to spell out a homophobic slur, and in March, when Fresno students festooned their campus with hate symbols.
Sociologist Raúl Pérez argues that labeling harmful humor as ‘just jokes’ is a common way people deny its connection to racism. Humor that ‘punches down’ at victims increases the likelihood of exclusion and violence toward vulnerable people.
When these scandals occur, institutional spokespeople often say, “these jokes do not reflect our values,” then focus on identifying and punishing ‘bad apples.’ But how do we get ahead of dehumanizing humor? What would it look like for schools to address not only isolated incidents, but the culture that allows them to persist?
I am a literacy education professor at Fresno State, and I also research humor—both its positive and negative effects. In my 2024 book, I examined the impact of racist humor on a Fresno-area high school, where in May 2022, photographs of a student in Klan attire led to district-wide student walkouts.
I argue schools must reckon with their complicity in hateful humor’s spread. And to do so, they must listen to youth. Students know things about their community.
“I was unsurprised it [happened], because they’ve done stuff like this in the past,” said one senior in response to the 2022 incident. “A lot of their students have been really racist. And I was also not surprised when I heard that the students weren’t reprimanded immediately, because [the school] has a history of not doing anything about it.”
A sophomore explained that the school “needs to have some form of reckoning because that’s been going on for a long time. Even my grandma—she [went there]. She’s always told me stories about things that happened, that they’ve always had a history of doing stuff like that. It’s always been an issue there. Always. Everyone has a story that they’ve encountered racism at [that school].”
How do you change a school’s culture? You listen to the people most impacted by not changing it. You implement new frameworks for reckoning with the problem. As opposed to waiting for harmful incidents to occur, and swiftly doing damage-control, schools could engage in more proactive and deliberate processes. Here are three interconnected ways they can respond more effectively to hateful humor.
Reframe incidents of degrading humor as institutional (not individual) problems
When racist or homophobic joking results in scandal, a school/district should take action beyond isolating and punishing individuals.
Schools are in a unique position to respond to dehumanizing humor, and it must start internally. When hateful joking occurs, schools might ask, “How have we been complicit in enabling the values and ideas that reared their ugly heads on our campus?” By understanding their own community history, engaging in critical reflection, and expanding professional development for employees, schools can take positive steps to reshape the culture.
Take humor seriously by addressing it in the curriculum
In 2023, Thomas Stewart, a Fresno-area teen, published an op-ed imagining a curriculum where students were educated about systemic disparities in our community. In his op-ed, the twelfth grader recognized that the racism that still plagues American society is not an individual issue, but historical, structural, and local. Treating the “plague” requires schools to do more than remove “infected” students but educate them.
This curriculum would include discussing the impact of hateful jokes in the world. English and social studies teachers, in particular, are uniquely positioned to work with students to examine what makes something funny to some people and not others, based on cultural specificity, history, geography, group dynamics, and power. Students could learn the ways ‘punching down,’ far from being ‘just a joke,’ leads to multiple types of harm, including genocide and political violence.
Listen to student demands and act on them
Students give schools a reason to exist, and as stated, we must listen to what they say. In the wake of the 2022 incident, the district’s Black Student Union leadership made formal demands for: cultural sensitivity training, enforcement of an antiracist resolution, increased recruitment and retention of Black teachers, and funding for student-run boards on racial justice. They also informally requested acknowledgement of the impact on students’ mental health and curriculum revisions.
The district’s concessions included the expansion of a Race and Social Justice student advisory board and the provision of counseling services.
I urge schools to continue to listen to – and better meet – the demands of students targeted by hateful humor. Time and again, we see organizations more focused on managing controversy and protecting themselves than addressing the harm experienced by targeted students.
Ultimately, hateful humor depends on the existence of hate, and it is never “just a joke.” Like the larger society around them, our schools reflect our priorities and beliefs. Becoming more inclusive will require schools to reckon with the fact that hateful jokes do, unfortunately, represent their values. But they don’t have to forever.
Removing bad apples won’t save the bunch. For that, we must recognize what causes the rot, and apply effective, preventive remedies.
We cannot normalize or desensitize ourselves to hateful humor, either in our schools or elsewhere in society. We need our students to become effective, unifying leaders—better ones than currently on display. Our schools must thus be prepared to ask difficult questions and commit to difficult work. If they do not, more hate, scandal, and community decay will surely follow.
David Low is a professor in the Department of Teacher Preparation at Fresno State, and author of Transgressive Humor in Classrooms (2024), which earned the Luis C. Moll Book Award.
This commentary was originally published by The Fresno Bee. It is part of Fresno State’s Public Voices Project, which helps faculty members share their research and expertise with broader public audiences through opinion writing. The views expressed are the author’s own.
